In recent years I have seen a lot of awareness around having a healthy relationship with food and body image(how we perceive ourselves physically). These are great improvements in the field of health and fitness.
Personally, I do not have much of an issue with my relationship with food or body image. But I do have some issues regarding my relationship with exercise which I’m not sure if many people in the fitness industry talk about. I’m guessing it’s not talked about as much compared to nutrition or body image issues
I have a partly damaged relationship with exercise.
Right from a very young age I started competing in individual and team sports. I was part of my school basketball team for a couple of years and I was training and competing in high jump right from 4th grade till my 12th. It was fun. I had lots of time to train, I had lots of time to rest. School administration, teachers and my physical education teacher would give me whatever I wanted. I hardly used to go to school.
Problems started when I joined college. By the time I joined college, I had a pretty decent performance according to my age category. I wanted to pursue my athletic career professionally. I was promised a lot of things before I joined. I was told there would be a lot of flexibility to train, I would have permission to take rest for important competitions, internal marks for exams would be taken care of, etc. All the usual stuff which all colleges promise their athletes.
The first year was fine. I had my best offseason training before college began which was enough for me to sail through the first years without any issues. But there were things that I kept noticing which were totally not what I expected. Getting permission to train was a pain in the ass. I would need to ask my HOD, my teachers, my year in-charge and my sports coordinator to get permission to prepare for competitions. Sometimes they would tell me, “These are smaller competitions, you can win these without training for them. Save these leaves for important competitions”. I literally saw my sporting dreams slipping out of my hands.
I didn’t know that the worst was yet to come. I would get permission to train for 2-5 days before competition so I had to directly train for my high jump technique sessions without any meaningful preparation. My body was breaking, my joints were aching after every competition simply because I was not prepared enough but I had to win, because that is why a college recruits sportsmen.
And still this is not the worst that happened, here are two things which ripped my soul out of me.
Our athletics team lost the team championship trophy and the college sports administration had a doubt that we wilfully lost the competition, so we were punished for that. (I came second in that competition)We were made to come to college everyday and stand all day for almost a month. We were only allowed to go for lunch. We did not attend any of our college classes.
After that with great difficulty, I started training again really hard to win one of the most important competitions for college level athletes in India. The All India Inter University Athletic Championship. I had come 3rd the previous year. I wanted to win the gold this time. I put in all my work, this was my final chance. I joined a gym close to my house to train after I came back from college at 7 PM. Everything went fine.
But, the dates of the All India competition, coincided with the local college competition held within the state. The All India competition was important for me, so I went and asked permission, and this is the reply I got “You were recruited to represent the college”. I was like “I am going to represent our university”. But they were like “College is different, university is different. You were recruited to represent our college. This competition is more prestigious to us”
In between all this, something else happened too. For almost 2 years I was consistently ranked second in India in the junior level. I finally got selected to represent India in the Junior(under 20) level and was asked to apply for my passport. It was going to be an Invitation meet in South Korea. I applied for it, gave my college friends a party (I was 19 then). The next day I got to hear that I wasn’t going to be on the team. Someone with a lesser performance got the opportunity. I did not know how to process this.
And then came a time when I had to quit sports to financially support my family. I had to quit sports when I was 21.
I’m sure there must be many similar stories among other sports too. These things do something to you which you may realize until very late in your life.
Preparing for competitions in just 10 days, for multiple years, has made me injury prone for life. I’ve got all sorts of aches almost all the time. I literally feel like my right leg does not belong to me. And everytime I exercise, I have no control over my mind when I’m trying to progress gradually.
It’s like everything goes fine for sometime and in just one day, I somehow jump from 2nd gear to 5th gear and hurt myself. And I don’t even know I’m doing that until after I have injured myself.
Probably all these experiences have made me a better coach, I guess.
It’s this all or nothing mindset when it comes to training which is so hard for me to get rid of, even though I know what it is. This is one reason why I can completely empathize with clients who keep going back to the all-or-nothing mindset knowing very well it will not work for them.
Personally, I have found a couple of strategies which work well for me. This one helped me the most: I kept asking myself “Why do I want to exercise?” I saw multiple fitness professionals talk about this and I gave it a try. It helped me a bit, but I couldn’t get to the root of the problem.
What really helped me get to the root of the issue was the question “Why don’t I feel like exercising?”. Answering this question helped me tremendously to figure out that my relationship with exercise has been so damaged and this realization was enough for me to start taking better decisions moving forward. But I would be lying if i say that I have overcome this. It does overtake me sometimes. I guess I might have to live with it.
I’m not sure if anyone can relate with this. I’m guessing atleast sportsmen can. I’ve noticed in my career as a trainer and talking to many of my friends who competed professionally in sports and they too have had similar experiences regarding training. I’m guessing maybe for some people taking this route of figuring out if they have a poor relationship with exercise might help them.
This is something very important to me and I have actively made sure that anyone who I’ve trained has a good relationship with exercise even when they are competing professionally or setting recreational goals for themselves.
I hope this story/rant helps someone. If you have faced similar issues, let me know. I’ll be happy to help
Coach Viru 